Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
Good news. The indie comedy Here’s the Kicker, which I labeled the biggest surprise at San Jose’s Cinequest film festival last year, is now out on DVD.
Please go to the movie’s Netflix page and click SAVE – once it gets enough SAVES, it will become available on Netflix.
It’s hard to write comedy. Otherwise, we’d be seeing lots of good comedies. That’s why it’s worth tagging along on the uproarious road trip in Here’s the Kicker.
Set in 1969 Florida, The Paperboy is a coming of age film nestled within a deliciously pulpy crime drama. The story is centered around an overlooked younger son (talented up-and-comer Zac Efron) who is thrilled when his older brother (Matthew McConaughey) returns to their swampy backwater after making it in the big time of Miami. The older brother is an investigative reporter who seeks the truth about a sensational death row case.
The strength of the film is in the supporting characters. David Oyelowo plays the older brother’s cynical and self-absorbed partner. John Cusack’s death row inmate is utterly animalistic, a real departure for Cusack. Nicole Kidman plays the convict’s pen pal fiance; the younger brother falls for her, but she’s apparently screwing everyone except him.
But the surprise performance in The Paperboy is by recording artist Macy Gray, who plays the family domestic. With complete authenticity, Gray is playful, hurt, dignified, angry, funny, tough, cagy and vulnerable and, as the narrator, she keeps the movie together. It’s a really superb performance, and I look forward to seeing Gray in more high profile parts.
This is director Lee Daniels’ follow up to his heart rending Precious. Once again, his character driven story-telling is first rate. The Paperboy is dark, violent, sexy and gripping with vivid characters.
Watch for Kidman’s particularly alarming treatment for jellyfish stings.
The pretty good horror movie Mama, with Jessica Chastain, can send chills down your spine without any slashing or splattering. Quartet, which opens this weekend, is a pleasant lark of a geezer comedy with four fine performances.
Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook are on my list of Best Movies of 2012 and all are nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
The French language drama Amour, also nominated for Best Picture, is a brilliantly made film about the end of life. It’s a lead pipe cinch to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar. It’s also an almost unbearable viewing experience.
If, like me, you worship the spaghetti Western, the Quentin Tarantino blockbuster Django Unchained is gloriously pedal-to-the-metal, splattering exploitation. The intelligent drama Rust and Bone is the singular tale of a complicated woman and an uncomplicated man.
Ang Lee’s visually stunning fable Life of Pi is an enthralling commentary on story-telling. Denzel Washington stars in Flight, a thriller about the miraculous crash landing of an airliner and the even more dangerous battle against alcoholism. Skyfall updates the James Bond franchise with thrilling action and a more shopworn 007 from Daniel Craig.
Skip the unoriginal mob movie Gangster Squad, which wastes its fine cast. Also pass on the lavish but stupefying all star Les Miserables, with its multiple endings, each more miserable than the last. The FDR movie Hyde Park on Hudson is a bore. The disaster movie The Impossible is only for audiences that enjoy watching suffering adults and children in peril.
I haven’t yet seen the raunchy all-star comedy Movie 43, which opens today. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD of the week is the gripping cop thriller End of Watch.
Quartet, an ensemble geezer comedy, is really an excuse for four brilliant actors (Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins) to show their chops. It’s set in a retirement home for retired musicians. The residents are preparing for an annual benefit performance, and the long-estranged ex-wife of a resident is moving in.
The most interesting character is the one played by Pauline Collins – a vivacious woman who may have always been ditzy and now has very little short-term memory. In 1996, Collins won a Tony and was nominated for an Oscar for the title role in Shirley Valentine.
Tom Courtenay plays a man still devastated by a bad breakup decades before. There’s a wonderful scene in which he explains opera to a class of working class teens by comparing it to rap. Courtenay is best known for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965), The Dresser (1983), but was excellent more recently in the overlooked Last Orders (2001).
Maggie Smith and Billy Connolly are very good in familiar roles. The irrepressible Connolly is very funny as a particularly randy old gentleman. Smith’s character is in her sweet spot – not unlike the sharp-edged but increasingly vulnerable gals she played in Gosford Park, Downton Abbey and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The actors playing the other residents are delightful, including a passel of opera stars from the 70s and 80s, Sinatra’s European trumpet player and more.
This is the first movie directed by Dustin Hoffman, and he did an able job. He takes advantage of the beautiful pastoral location, paces the film well and, as one would expect, enables the actors to turn in very fine performances. Quartet is just a lark, but not a bad way to spend an hour and a half.
The pretty good horror movie Mama, with Jessica Chastain, can send chills down your spine without any slashing or splattering. It’s the story of two orphaned little girls who have survived in the forest for four years. When they are rescued, they are feral creatures who scurry about on four legs. They are sheltered at first in a research institute, and then in their uncle’s home. It turns out that, unbeknownst to the adult characters, the sisters were “parented” in the forest by a being who comes along with them.
Jessica Chastain brings an unexpectedly rich characterization to this genre film. She plays the uncle’s girlfriend, the tattooed bass player in a rock band, who didn’t sign up to parent two deeply troubled kids. She is apologetically non-maternal, but forced by circumstance to co-parent and then to single parent the girls. Ultimately, she has a face-off with a very jealous and very scary competitor.
The entire cast is excellent, especially Megan Charpentier as the older daughter and Daniel Kash as the ambitious scientist. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the scary bad guy in Headhunters, plays softer as both the girls’ decompensating dad and their compassionate uncle.
I’m generally not a fan of horror films and I especially loathe the gorefests that currently dominate the genre. But the Mama delivers the scares the old-fashioned way, with inventive characters, a sense of foreboding and a creepy and dangerous villain.
End of Watch is a top notch thriller of a cop movie, and it made my list of Best Movies of 2012. Two cops, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, patrol a hell hole beat in South Central LA. They are well-intentioned cops, but they are testosterone-fueled young guys. They are always looking for action, and this neighborhood has plenty of action. They ultimately bite off more than they should try to chew.
Writer-director David Ayer (Training Day) has made a movie that rises above the genre because of the well-written main characters and their relationship. We watch them chiefly from a camera on the dashboard of their squad car. We learn that they are both decent guys and both adrenaline junkies, but one is more aspirational and one is more settled. They are both funny, and the multiracial theater audience at my screening was howling at the ethnic ball-breaking.
There are also some impressive chases, often filmed with the dashboard camera facing forward. It’s thrilling stuff. There’s a lot of shaky cam (which I usually hate), but here it works well to enhance the chaos of the setting as well as the action.
The rest of the cast is excellent, most notably Natalie Martinez and Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) as the love interests, David Harbour, America Ferrera and Frank Grillo as fellow cops, and Diamonique as a fierce gangbanger.
And here’s a shout out to Michael Peña. In End of Watch, Peña nails both the humor and the action; he’s on-screen almost the whole movie and has an engaging presence. He has played so many Latino cops, and he really deserves a chance to show what he can do with a different type of role.
Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook are on my list of Best Movies of 2012. and all nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. My top pick remains the enthralling Zero Dark Thirty tells the story of the frustrating, wearying and dangerous ten-year man hunt for Bin Laden. In Lincoln, Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis push aside the marble statue and bring to life Abraham Lincoln the man. Argo is Ben Affleck’s brilliant thriller based on a true story from the Iran Hostage Crisis. The rewarding dramedy Silver Linings Playbook has a strong story, topicality and humor, but it’s worth seeing just for Jennifer Lawrence’s performance.
The French language drama Amour is a brilliantly made film about the end of life. It’s a lead pipe cinch to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar. It’s also an almost unbearable viewing experience.
If, like me, you worship the spaghetti Western, the Quentin Tarantino blockbuster Django Unchained is gloriously pedal-to-the-metal, splattering exploitation. The intelligent drama Rust and Bone is the singular tale of a complicated woman and an uncomplicated man. Matt Damon’s stellar performance leads a fine cast in Promised Land, an engaging (until the corny ending) drama about exploitation of natural gas in rural America. Not Fade Away is a pleasant enough, but unremarkable 60s coming of age story by The Sopranos creator David Chase and rocker Steven Van Zandt.
Ang Lee’s visually stunning fable Life of Pi is an enthralling commentary on story-telling. Denzel Washington stars in Flight, a thriller about the miraculous crash landing of an airliner and the even more dangerous battle against alcoholism. Skyfall updates the James Bond franchise with thrilling action and a more shopworn 007 from Daniel Craig.
Skip the unoriginal mob movie Gangster Squad, which wastes its fine cast. Also pass on the lavish but stupefying all star Les Miserables, with its multiple endings, each more miserable than the last. The FDR movie Hyde Park on Hudson is a bore. The disaster movie The Impossible is only for audiences that enjoy watching suffering adults and children in peril.
You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD of the week is the French odd couple movie The Intouchables – a real crowd pleaser and the second most popular movie of all time in France.
If you’re lucky, you get old. When you get old, you eventually get infirm and then you die. I generally do not focus on this grim truth, but no one can argue it isn’t part of the human condition, and director Michael Haneke explores it with his film Amour.
We meet a delightful elderly couple played by French film icons Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. They live a comfortable and independent life, engaged in culture and current events, until she suffers a stroke. He steps up to become her sensible and compassionate caregiver. However, the decline of her health brings humiliating dependence is for her and frustration and weariness for him. It finally becomes unbearable for both of them (and for the audience).
Amour is heartbreaking, made so by its utter authenticity. I have been plunged by circumstance into the caregiving role at times, and I recognized every moment of fear, frustration, resentment and exhaustion that the husband experiences.
I tend to despise Haneke because he is a sadistic filmmaker. I hated his critically praised The White Ribbon because the audience has to sit through 144 minutes of child abuse for the underwhelming payoff that parents of Germany’s Nazi generation were mean to them. In Funny Games, where a gang of sadistic psychos invade a home, Haneke toys with the audience’s expectation that the victimized family will be rescued in a thriller or avenged – but they are simply slaughtered. However, he doesn’t manufacture cruelty in Amour, the cruelty is in the truth of the subject.
Haneke’s brilliant skill in framing a scene, his patience in letting a scene develop in real-time and his severe, unsparing style are well-suited to Amour’s story. He is able to explore his story of love, illness and death with complete authenticity. That, and the amazing performances by Trintignant and Riva, make the film worthwhile. That being said, it is a painful and not enjoyable viewing experience.
Amour is an undeniably excellent film. Whether you want to watch it is a different story.
The Intouchables is the second most popular movie of all time in France – and it’s easy to see why. It’s an odd couple comedy that’s a real crowd pleaser.
A very, very rich French aristocrat has become a quadriplegic due to a hang gliding accident and hires a Senegalese good-for-nothing street hood as his caregiver. The plot, really just a series of set pieces, mines familiar territory as the poor guy learns about living in a mansion (see Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and revitalizes the rich guy’s zest for living. But it’s really well done and very funny.
The rich guy is played by the great Francois Cluzet (Tell No One), who gives a tremendous performance using only his head and neck. Omar Sy plays the poor guy and actually edged out The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin for France’s top acting award last year; that’s hard to figure, but Sy is very funny in The Intouchables. Overall, it’s a very satisfying comedy.
An uncommon collection of acting talent (Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Josh Brolin, Emma Stone, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi) sinks with Gangster Squad, a mob movie based on Mickey Cohn’s 1949 sojourn in LA. Because director Reuben Fleischer recently made Zombieland, which I loved for its original approach to zombie movies. Unfortunately, there is not one original minute in Gangster Squad. If you enjoy movie violence, avoid Gangster Squad and see Django Unchained a second time.
Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohn – or maybe he’s playing Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas. What made Pesci’s volatile character so menacing (and unforgettable) was that you never knew when he would irrationally erupt and do something unthinkably horrible. But Penn’s character is totally predictable – he always does the worst thing imaginable so there’s no menace; it’s like watching Michael Vick train dogs – just gruesome.
Gangster Squad was slated for a September 7, 2012, release, but it contained a scene of a mass shooting inside a movie theater; the Aurora, Colorado, tragedy made the distributor skittish, so another scene was shot to replace it, delaying the release for four months.